Afghan: Karzai's Cabinet Proposes Return of Religious Police

[Robbien]

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 20 (OneWorld) - An Afghan government proposal to re-establish the notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has raised concerns among U.S. human rights advocates. Under the Taliban, the virtue and vice department enforced restrictions on women and men through public beatings and imprisonment.

Its agents "beat women publicly for wearing socks that were not sufficiently opaque; showing their wrists, hands or ankles; and not being accompanied by a close male relative," Zama Coursin-Neff, of New York-based Human Rights Watch, told OneWorld. "They also stopped women from educating girls in home-based schools, working, and begging. They beat men for trimming their beards," she added.

When the U.S. government overthrew the Taliban in 2001, the virtue department was scrapped. Now the cabinet of President Hamid Karzai is asking the country's elected parliament to re-instate the religion-based police force.

It remains unclear what the department's powers would be. Nematullah Shahrani, the minister of Haj and religious offices, has said it would focus on alcohol, drugs, crime, and corruption.

But human rights activists say offenses like drugs and corruption are already addressed by Afghanistan's criminal laws. They see no reason for creating a virtue and vice department except to implement fundamentalist edicts.

http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/136770/1/4536